Svobodný software

While two years ago Google notably axed support for JPEG-XL within the Chrome web browser, they remain bullish on WebP and AVIF for imaging needs. This past week they finally announced Google Search is now supporting AVIF images...

Firefox 130 web browser binaries were published today ahead of the official release announcement going out on Tuesday. Firefox 130 isn't too particularly exciting but there are a few changes worth mentioning...

The AMD GCN3 (GFX8) support and in particular the Fiji GPU support is being retired from the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The Fiji GPU support in the GCC compiler was already deprecated in part due to the LLVM compiler having already removed Fiji support months ago and the AMD ROCm compute driver having broken GCN3 / Fiji support for years...

One year ago the first Rust-written network PHY driver was merged for the Linux 6.8 kernel. Since then we've continued seeing steady progress on more Rust-written Linux network code. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window another Rust PHY driver is set to be introduced...

Intel Compute Runtime 24.31.30508.7 was released this morning as the newest version of this OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero compute stack used on both Windows and Linux platforms. Notable with the Intel Compute Runtime 24.31.30508.7 is having initial Xe2 support...

Ahead of this week's GNOME 47 release candidate announcement the "47.rc" versions of the GNOME Shell and Mutter were tagged on Sunday...

Kdenlive as the KDE-aligned non-linear open-source video editing application is out with its newest feature release...

Armbian 24.8 has been released as the newest version of this Debian-based Linux distribution that began with a focus on ARM boards but has also expanded to include RISC-V as well as traditional x86_64 Intel/AMD systems too...

With the start of the new month comes the Steam Survey results for the month prior. The August 2024 data is in and it points to the Steam on Linux statistics dipping back below 2%...

Like with last week's Linux 6.11-rc5 release, Linux 6.11-rc6 is out a half-day early due to Linus Torvalds' ongoing foreign travels. Linux 6.11-rc6 brings many more fixes to this kernel that will debut as stable in mid-September,..

August was a very busy month with the first AMD Ryzen 9000 series "Zen 5" desktop processors going on sale, finally having AmpereOne 192-core Arm processors in the lab, Linux kernel development continuing to advance at a brisk pace, and a variety of other interesting software and hardware milestones. On Phoronix for the month were 213 original news articles authored by me as well as another 20 Linux hardware reviews / featured-length articles...

FreeBSD 13.4 is due out in just over one week's time while this weekend brought FreeBSD 13.4-RC2 as the last planned test candidate...

Arm engineer Mihail Atanassov proposed a set of "request for comments" patches this week for adding user submission support to the Panthor DRM driver that is used for handling newer Arm Mali graphics under Linux. This would allow user-space more easily to submit work directly to the GPU hardware without kernel intervention for better performance and management capabilities...

Intel has released a new version of their open-source Video Processing Library (VPL) for hardware-accelerated video encode / decode / processing across Intel graphics hardware...

Debian 12.7 is out today as the latest stable release update for the Debian Bookworm series...

The Rust-based, open-source Servo web engine had a very eventful month as the developers involved continue advancing this browser engine as well as their example/reference web browser...

This week's batch of power management fixes for the Linux 6.11 kernel are just a set of three patches for AMD processors...

A new AVX2 code path for FFmpeg's VVC decoding "vvcdec" is helping provide significant speed-ups for CPU-based H.266 decoding...

Jonas Ådahl released Wayland-Protocols 1.37 as the newest update to this defined set of Wayland protocols. With the new release there are three new protocols added plus various other maintenance items addressed within the Wayland-Protocols repository...

Plasma 6.2 this week entered its soft feature freeze ahead of the Plasma 6.2 stable release in October. The focus now is on bug-fixing for Plasma 6.2 and at the moment they are at 301 bug reports, which is their lowest amount going back to 2015. The KDE developers hope over the next month to drop that to less than 200 bug reports...